Two teenage sisters--Bernadette, the explorer and skeptic; and Jane, the Christian optimist--engage in an unorthodox battle for the truth of their attack in the Australian bush. As they grow up, each seeks refuge in their own world: Bernadette in the maps and writings of the 19th century explorer Charles Stuart, Jane in her faith and teaching. Their parents, Audrey and Robert, unaware of what's happened, deal with their own break in the security of their marriage. Audrey copes by creating a button quilt, its patterns an intricate topography hinting at the family's secrets and betrayals. As the quilt grows and the years pass with the growing burden of what's unsaid and denied, each character bends the boundaries of time and memory to negotiate with the trauma that has separated them from themselves and each other... [ more on Amazon ]

Walter Cummins has published six previous short story collections: Witness, Where We Live, Local Music, The End of the Circle, The Lost Ones, Habitat: stories of bent realism. More than 100 of his stories, as well as memoirs, essays, and reviews, have appeared in magazines such as New Letters, Kansas Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Under the Sun, Arts & Letters, Confrontation, Bellevue Literary Review, Connecticut Review, The Laurel Review, Other Voices, Georgetown Review, Contrary, Sonora Review, Abiko Quarterly, Weber Studies, Midwest Quarterly, West Branch, South Carolina Review, Crosscurrents, Crescent Review, The MacGuffin, in book collections, and on the web.

Walter Cummins is a master of revealing quiet truths. His stories stay with one's consciousness. It is an intellectual, emotional pleasure to turn the pages of his story collections. They engorge one with questions that there are few answers for. He's a secret poet to any perspicacious reader. Cummins bends reality achieving dark epiphanies as enduring as his quondam revelations. It all begins with his arresting sentences.

From 1743 Prussia to 2238 Dubai, the Pan Buddhist Democratic Union (PBDU) wages war to save humanity from being annihilated and replaced in the 21st century by a mad vision of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. PBDU member, Czarina Catherine II, joins forces with spellcrafter Zolo Bold as well as her younger self, the Princess Freddie von Anhalt, and together with World Maker Niccolo Paganini they face an implacable foe, the most brilliant mind to ever invent the future: Leonardo da Vinci--recast to the 21st century as Master Edison Godfellow, inventor and magician supreme.

"War of the World Makers" by Michaels is a dark science-fantasy with no delusions of grandeur. It is truly grand. [ more about this novel ]

In a style by turns bitingly satiric and deadly serious, Norman Ball exposes the Red-Blue divide for the sham it is. The much-trumpeted Democrat to Republican transfers of power, then back again, are all hollow gestures full of sound-bite and fury signifying nothing but divide-and-conquer.

A World Without War is a compilation of essays written since 2000 by activist producer and playwright Don Thompson (Tibet in Song, Democracy: A Work in Progress, L.A. Book of the Dead). Written for popular webzines such as The Potomac Journal (ed. Michael Neff) and SolPix, the essays chronicle important political and cultural issues and trends post 9/11 -- all with Thompson's unique and independent perspective that often puts a completely new spin on familiar topics.

Whether on a resort island, on a bus burrowing through the darkness, disoriented in European cities and villages, fearful at a lakeside table or on a mountain climb, bewildered in the crypt of the Vatican or in rooms and landscapes suddenly strange, the people in these sixteen stories don't know where they are or who they are. They struggle to locate themselves in their lives.

Detour charts the struggle of a movie-obsessed would-be medical student to avoid at all cost the straitjacket of a fixed identity. His transient, too intense sexual relationship with a rootless former heroin addict becomes one of the many "detours" that seem to frustrate but ultimately define his quest for connectedness and the fulfillment of a true calling. Detour received the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Citation of the PEN American Center in 1979.

Mad Anatomy is a collection of literary shorts that explores the prism-like psychology of intimacy and human relationship. DSP assures you this collection cannot be surpassed in terms of originality and voice. Kimberly is a brilliant fiction writer.

These twelve short stories--Matthew J. Sullivan's winning story, "Unfound," and eleven finalists--show the range possible in the contemporary literary short story and offer a snapshot of some of the most compelling writing by established and emerging literary talents. From a pool of over five hundred stories, some published in very well-known journals and magazines, and many unpublished, our panel of readers selected these ?nalists, the best of the best, for the 2005 Robert Olen Butler Prize for a Short Story. Matthew J. Sullivan's winning story, "Unfound," was chosen from these finalists by our judge, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler. Here you'll find stories by: Cheryl Alu, Jacob M. Appel, Kerry Dolan, Alicia Gifford, Alison Lee Kinney, Phil Lamarche, Cris Mazza, Jeff Parker, Bill Pettitt, Peter Paul Smith, Matthew J. Sullivan, and Alia Yunis.

These eleven stories--E. R. Catalano's winning story, "News from My Father," and ten finalist--show the range possible in the contemporary literary short story and offer a snapshot of some of the best writing by established and emerging literary talents. From a pool of over six hundred stories, some published in very well-known journals, and many unpublished, our panel of readers selected these ten finalists, the best of the best, in 2004. E.R. Catalano's winning story, "News from My Father," was chosen from these finalists by our 2004 judge, Robert Olen Butler.

"What I love most about each of these enigmatic, glistery, beautiful, and intricately inventive stories is their valuable celebration of and commitment to the Difficult Imagination. Comprised of skewed appropriations and manipulations of 'canonical' work by the likes of Melville, Kafka, and Joyce, this collection reminds us again and again of two profound points: that 'originality' and 'truth' are, at best, states of mind, and that loss and death remain the only two things we'll never really be able to deconstruct. All I Can Truly Deliver marks the arrival of an important new talent to the festival called exploratory fiction." - Lance Olsen

"Nin Andrews explodes the iconography of our childhoods as she creates a new series of Dick and Jane readers, this time earmarked for adults who desperately need a vocabulary for a different time. With edgy humor and deep understanding of the shadows we all cast, she gives us a Dick and Jane we can't resist. The bizarre nature of the world she creates is what initially draws us in, but what keeps us there is our growing knowledge that it's our world too." - Joyce Dyer

"What a strange and intense book this is! David Blair has a wild, restless imagination and he uses language like saw, a hammer, a velvet whip. He can write incredibly tender (and original) love poems and enfilading satirical poems, as well as many of the many other 'kinds' of poems between those poles, and they all seem entirely at home, indeed, need to be in this book together. His music, his diction, his refusal to use (ever!) clichés, his syntax all drive his poems and their hearts forward. That is where his poems go: forward. He will be in the company of the best poets of his generation." —Thomas Lux

In a fierce landscape, these poems--violent and lovely, transcendental and desperate--jar us into new senses ... And further, in Julianne Buchsbaum's dense, laconic poems, poise solicits passion and urgency courts elegance. Her rich, lucid, alliterative lexicon, full of apt surprise and happily astray amid the glitter of evidence, makes a dictionary of the small parts of world and the larger parts those parts make. And love is never far from the parted lips, in all its errors and ecstasies€ —Reginald Shepherd

"Taut with the voice of many close-held wisdoms, Austin Hummell's POPPY is laced with a brilliant restraint and an odd humility. He traps the feral, injured thing and tames it just enough to examine the damage, then sets it back again, free. These poems deliver their partial deaths with a startling clarity, and do not flinch from the unbeautiful. Hummell is a master of extremity, and of beauty too. He is one of the most exacting and exciting, most wounding and unflinching new poets I've read in a good long while." - Lucie Brock-Broido

"The most lyrical poems (mostly in prose) that I have read in years. A silver-tongued 'I' with little concern for itself, so wakeful and watchful is it embodied, and so attuned to its bounty of fabulous perceptions. A first collection brought to a nearly translucent state of shine. —C.D. Wright

"Torch Lake & Other Poems is the most original and exciting collection given American poetry since Larry Levis’ Elegy. There’s more juice, scope, imagination and sheer vitality in this work than in twenty run-of-the-mill collections." —Gray Jacobik

Winner of the Del Sol Press 2005 Poetry Prize, David Ray Vance's poetry collection combines science and art gloriously. Mary Jo Bang, the Prize Judge, has this to say about Vitreous: "Part rewritten 1934 medical text, part Keatsian reflection, this is the logical offspring of the long-awaited meeting of science and art; a marriage of equals where each half maintains its primary allegiance: the poetic to the common lyrical language of emotion and memory, the medical to its narrowly appropriated lexicon of intraocular, cornea, and Placido's disc. Mr. Vance has woven these two competing word streams into a meditation on sight and risk. Think of it as an item in the cupboard of the scientifically sublime. Think of Ronald Johnson's Ark. Vitreous is utterly fascinating in its reach, and exquisitely tender. And important, because it answers again today's recurrent question, Can form be further broken and still be a poem? The answer (of course) is yes."

In language at once candid and layered, calm and devastating, terrifying and gorgeous, the poems in Allegra Wong's first collection, A Pure Bead, cut deep to the heart, reveal small and piercing dramas of human joy and suffering as if through a diorama's eye-hole. These vivid poem-worlds expand emotionally and intellectually; give off shocks; attract, disturb, unsettle, and finally allow a tender and profound beauty to emerge. Here is nothing less than the complex, psychologically accurate world of humankind. Put your eye to these dioramas: you won't be able to stop looking.

Literary travelers Thomas E. Kennedy and Walter Cummins set off for an afternoon with J. P. Donleavy in his Irish mansion, to visit the Paris of Hemingway, the Lisbon of Bernardo Soares, Joyce's Dublin and his gravesite in Zurich, the Ionian home of Lafcadio Hearne where Sappho plunged to her death (or did she?), the Victorian pubs of London where Phileas Fogg made his famous wager, Synge's Aran Islands, Voltaire's Ferney, the luxurious abode of Baroness Varvara in Copenhagen, the "secret" erotic shrine of Emanuel Vigeland in Oslo, Robert Graves's Mallorca, and the digs and haunts of scores of New York writers, Helsinki, Chicago, Florence, Venice, Slovenia, the Rhine of Goethe and Byron, the Alps, Stonehenge, Oxfordshire, the mysteries of the Yorkshire Dales, and the poets and pubs of Edinburgh's Auld Reekie. Journey with them, off the beaten path, down the narrow allies, up the mountains and into the pubs in search of literary history.

Your Life Is a Movie contains some of the most provocative thinking about media, film and culture you're likely to encounter. Drawn from scholars, political pundits, film makers and film critics--ranging from the famous to the relatively obscure--this anthology of interviews and essays is a must-read for anyone concerned about the direction of film and media in modern culture. Contributors include Eric Alterman, Ray Carney, Patricia Ducey, Timothy Dugdale, Todd Gitlin, T. B. Meek, Michael Neff, Rob Nilsson, Nicholas Rombes, and Don Thompson.

DIAGRAM.2, the second print anthology from the popular online magazine of text, art, and schematic, DIAGRAM, includes selections from its third and fourth years of publication. Includes a wide array of strange, never-before-seen schematics from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, chosen for their strangeness and beauty. Like the first print anthology, (Some from) DIAGRAM: Selections from the Magazine and More, this is an often bizarre, sometimes funny, often profound, and always intense collection. Edited by Ander Monson, author of Other Electricities and Vacationland.

DIAGRAM, the online periodical of esoteric oddness and schematic, presents selections from the first two years, available in print for the first time. It includes a wealth of strange diagrams from the 19th Century as well as sonnets, stories, essays, outlines, singing appliances, good science, in-between-genre weirdness, and much loveliness.